


With A Savage Woe

by CloudDreamer



Series: Ballad [3]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Choking, Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, Drowning, F/F, Lesbians in Space, Local Lesbian Comes To Terms With Gender Identity; Death Toll In The Millions, POV Second Person, The Siren Saga, Vampires, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23601202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: To be Doctor Carmilla is to be choked in blood.Title from a translation of Heinrich Heine's "Die Lorelei."Necessary disclaimer of, we know fuck all about the Siren Saga, and Loreli is an absolute mystery. Only some of this is substantiated.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Jonny d'Ville, Dr Carmilla & Nastya Rasputina, Dr Carmilla & The Toy Soldier, Dr Carmilla/Loreli
Series: Ballad [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678978
Kudos: 16
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	With A Savage Woe

You live your cruel facsimile of life choked by blood Before you die, it’s your blood. You’re the one who stands in the way. You’re the one who takes the pain, because Loreli can’t. You don’t begrudge her for it, that’s why you put yourself on the line, time and time again. You do it for her sad smile and her hand in yours, running down the streets with the knowledge that this could be the last time the Sirens sing. You think you love her. She holds you when no one else will. When everyone else just sees your anger, she sees your passion, and you begin to think you might deserve her.

But she isn’t there when he takes your eye and your life. She isn’t there to stitch up your wounds. You might’ve saved her when you told her to run, but as you laid there dying, bleeding for the last time, you wonder if it’s worth it. You wonder if it was worth it time and time again. When your hunger steals everything human about you away. When he dies by your hands, the only hands that could, you wonder if she would’ve been able to move on. If she could’ve lived this liminal space between life and death. She never would’ve fallen to the hunger in the first place, you convince yourself, even as you feel it rising up in you even stronger. 

You don’t know how she dies, but you convince yourself she wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for you. If she’d learned to fight for herself or if you could control yourself well enough to protect her. But you’re not the sun she loved anymore. You are nothing more than the parasite that stole her lover’s skin and mind. When she’s gone, you lose yourself. You don’t look for other ways, you don’t hold back. You just make anyone you can think of to blame pay, because when you’re making them suffer, you manage to convince yourself that it’s worth it, that there was a reason for all this. By the time think to look at yourself in the mirror, the home you both loved and hated in equal measure is gone. The planet is still there and there’s more people to hurt, but you know they won’t live for long. 

It was a dying world, and you imagine yourself as the doctor pulling the plug on a terminal patient so you don’t hate yourself as much anymore, but it doesn’t keep the nightmares away. It doesn’t stop the sea of blood from rising up, threatening to drown you.

It doesn’t make it any easier, the next time you have to make a choice. You make the wrong choice again and again. You know she’d make better ones again and again, and it’s only when Jonathan destroys his first civilization for your attention do you realize you were wrong again. She always imagined having a family. She said you’d be a good parent, and she was wrong. For a while there, you hate her, and you hate all the times you bled for her. But you realized how badly you’ve fucked up again, thinking you could hate her, because you see her spirit in Anastasia. They almost look alike. Not in the hair or the voice or the eyes, but in the way she holds herself when she’s scared. 

You break Anastasia too. Soon enough, she looks at you the same way Loreli did in the end. Her shoulders square. She doesn’t lash out when she’s angry, but she watches Jonathan like Loreli watched you. A different sort of love, but one forged in fire nonetheless. And when Anastasia finds that sort of love, you can’t even bring yourself to be jealous. 

You knew the Toy Soldier before your Mechanisms did. You walk the streets of the cities they flew above with its hand in yours. There was nothing in it you could hurt. You couldn’t even feed from the Toy Soldier, a burden that the war made so easy to carry. The Rose Reds suffer so easily. They are born for it. Their hearts ache with a pain they’ll never live long enough to understand, hurting from a loss their first will never heal from. They are only allowed memories of the warmth of the sun on their skin so they can feel the pain of it torn away. 

You hate yourself for Ashes, but they were just like you. They’d been betrayed, they’d been broken, and now they burned. They could breathe again, this way, you could fix them. You always made sure to ask, each time, and they weren’t delusional from blood loss. You thought about trying before, you watched more tragedies unfold than you could count, but the others, they weren’t right. It’d be better for them to die, happier endings, but Ashes, they deserved to burn. That world was doomed too, you swear, you promise to yourself, it’s fine, and it’s in that fire that you find Ivy. Her family was long gone. She didn’t have a sister or a lover to take her by her hand. She didn’t have anyone to lead her out of the dark, and there you were. It was so soon, but this was your fault. You had to make it right, even as you knew you’d left all the others for dead. 

Brian was a mystery to you as well, but you let him have his lies. Sometimes that’s all a person has in this world. Lies and the loneliness of space, too incomprehensible for anyone but you. Tim was a mistake, you know he was a mistake. They were all mistakes. The next time they push you out into the cold of space, you stay gone. You make a new ship. You go far away, but never enough away. Never enough to feel safe. And when the other two happen, in worlds of angels that fall too far, too fast, and worlds of mechanical beasts too big to comprehend, they find the family you made so easily. It takes years, but for you, years is so fast.

They are gone before you are. Their blood, from their first deaths to their last, is on your hands. All the blood they spill in that time, and it’s a hell of a lot of blood, is on your hands. When you exhale for the last time, you feel the weight of your sins finally drag you beneath the waves. You are not to be released or to be forgiven. 

But you do stop, and for the first time in such a very long time, you don’t make anyone else bleed for your flaws. 


End file.
